OpenStreetMap
Started editing today. Very impressive website! Coming from Wikipedia, much of it is straightforward, but the fact that discussions are attached to individual edits, not to features, takes a bit of a leap.
The tutorial was very good, only gripe is that for tracing the shape of a building they selected one that has a protrusion on the south side, but when one follows the instruction to meticulously enter the shape, it says something like “It looks like you’re having problems tracing the shape” and forces one to completely and scrupulously redo the task – until one figures out that one actually gets punished for being too meticulous! 💢
Also worked with StreetComplete, which is very convenient for the cell phone. My main wishes:
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Terms such as “surface=sett” should link to the wiki so that one can read the complete explanation, instead of having to guess from one tiny picture.
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When I mistakenly tagged the wrong building, there was no easy way to undo the mistake. There also was no one-tap way to add some attention mark (such as an exclamation point). So I ended up writing a note, but by the time I got to my PC, I didn’t see that note. Possibly someone else corrected my mistake and deleted the note, but then I would have expected to be informed in some way about that.
Discussion
Comment from danieldegroot2 on 1 October 2021 at 16:38
Hey -and welcome- Sebastian,
Good thing you encountered a more complicated building. You can still work around this in iD, but once you get the hang of this editor, you can start working with JOSM and its plugins, which will help you to avoid some of these issues. For buildings with clearly non-square corners, you can leave it as is of course.
Be sure to submit feedback to the project’s github (otherwise, feedback and/or other contact info is usually listed in the app’s settings or on their website). First do look at the readme at the bottom and always check if a similar issue might not exist already. Then just hit “Add issue” and turn on notifications for replies, if they are not by default. https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/1913
1) already has an issue submitted Add clarifications / details for quests #1913.
2) should be available as a button in the bottom left, as explained in the FAQ (except for the author of this issue). I assume you did not see it, as did another user. If you have suggestions on how to improve visibility, feel free to create an issue.
If you don’t see the note under your Profile; osm.org/user/SebastianHelm/notes chances are it did not upload.
Regards,
Daniel
PS: Regarding the notes you responded to; (if you did,) do not blindly accept editor warnings in i.e. iD/JOSM. These are meant for experienced mappers who are familiar with these tags. In the case of healthcare=hospital it’s relatively harmless and also kind of pointless, since it is just another tag for the same thing (there’s multiple tagging schemes here, there’s no decision on which one to use).
Comment from SebastianHelm on 1 October 2021 at 19:59
Thank you for reading my diary entry and for your advice. I’ve become a bit rusty on github, but it’s a good suggestion to provide my feedback there. I will probably do so next week.
Yes, I wasn’t aware of the undo button – that’s a big help! My suggestion would be to
But yeah, you’re right, this comment isn’t the best place for that, I’ll probably have to provide that on github, too.
Yes, I did respond to – or more exactly: resolved – some notes. But I don’t understand what you mean by “blindly accept”. That isn’t how I operate. Can you please be more specific? Would it help if I gave you a list of the notes I resolved?
Kind regards
Sebastian
Comment from danieldegroot2 on 2 October 2021 at 10:58
I am refering to this comment (which was given multiple times): “OSM suggested adding a healthcare=hospital tag, so I did that, too.” ( osm.org/note/2772009 )
These warnings/issues displayed in the editor (the app you edit with; when editing on the OSM website itself, you are using the iD editor) should not be accepted if you don’t know what the change means. In the case of adding healthcare=hospital, it isn’t really needed, as it essentially means the same as amenity=hospital or building=hospital -which are the important tags-, it just depends whether you prefer adding this tag or want to show support for this tagging scheme (how a certain feature is tagged). It sounded like you did this without looking at the tag’s description. Luckily, adding such a tag isn’t always harmful. There are, however, warnings in the editor which, if blindly accepted (without looking at what tags they add or what objects they change), can result in inaccurate (bad quality), such as when adding bridges and culverts, or incorrect mapping, such as when they add outdated tags (editors are not always using the newest tag).
- Get in touch with the OpenStreetMap community
Comment from SebastianHelm on 3 October 2021 at 14:40
Thank you for your explanation and the link. The change you link to, as well as the duplication you discuss, was not brought about by an “editor warning”, but by a wish of a fellow mapper, expressed in a note.
Rest assured that I didn’t act in any way that could justly be termed “blindly”: Not only did I see the duplication, I pinpointed it both in the edit summary as well as here, so as to make it visible to good mappers like yourself. In addition, I studied the wiki and specifically asked about this duplication on the appropriate talk page.
You write “These […] should not be accepted if you don’t know what the change means”. Is that an official rule on OSM? I don’t see that in the good practice recommendations. Would you have a link to that rule?
Re: “editors are not always using the newest tag”: That sounds like a problem of the editors. Instead of trying to change all fellow mappers’ reasonable behavior for all their work with tags, wouldn’t it be much more productive to submit specific feedback to the appropriate editor’s github to get those issues fixed?
Comment from danieldegroot2 on 3 October 2021 at 18:40
No problem.
After we talked about it, I asked for it to finally be added to the wiki. It’s been added here; osm.wiki/w/index.php?title=Quality_assurance&diff=2204097&oldid=2185601 (on the page “Quality assurance”, use ctrl+f if you can’t find it) I’ve suggested for it to be mentioned on Good practice as well.
No, this is because sometimes the developers saw that a tag was descibed as the “accepted” tag on the wiki or elsewhere and then thought it was the one to use. People complained, but initially they didn’t know better and eventually they might have been focused on other things. Anyhow, those (two) developers were fired/left the project (there was a high amount of issues being reported and only so many being fixed) and those issues still exist. People complain these are issues with the editor and the developers didn’t discuss or document the tag correctly, but it is actually an issue with the way the tags themselves are discussed and documented. For some issues -in general- people simply haven’t had the time to add in a pull request or fix the issues with their pull requests.
Comment from SebastianHelm on 4 October 2021 at 10:32
Thank you for your informative reply. I now understand how this came about, and I commend you for writing this in the QA page. Duplicating this information in the Good practice page, IMHO, doesn’t promise to be particularly helpful, though. Instead, it may be more helpful to merge these pages…
Wait a minute – I just noticed that there’s a third such page: Editing Standards and Conventions. 😲 So we have three different articles for topics which appear pretty much the same to a beginner! A three-way merge may be a lot of work, and may result in a page that would be too long. If those three topics are different enough to an advanced mapper to deserve individual articles, then it may be best to optimize one for beginners and point to the others from there, with some short text that helps the beginner select the next topic to read up to before they can map with confidence.